Death penalty poster boy

"Live FROM Virginia, it's execution night!" So might an announcer have introduced the ghoulish media circus outside the Greensville Correctional Center on May 20, where no fewer than 14 satellite trucks and 50 cameras awaited the execution of Roger Keith Coleman for the rape and murder of his sister-in-law, Wanda Fay McCoy, 11 years ago. The evening featured numerous television news breaks with "the latest" on Coleman's pending execution, coincidentally scheduled for the top of the 11 o'clock news hour. A lie-detector test earlier in the day (which Coleman failed) and a 15-minute stay of execution from the U.S. Supreme Court at 10:59 P.M. to consider his frivolous, last-minute appeal, added to the media drama.

Execution night marked the culmination of what Time magazine called "a canny campaign to draw media attention to Coleman's case," waged by 28-year-old Kathleen "Kitty" Behan of Arnold & Porter, a high-powered Washington law and lobbying firm. The campaign was enormously successful. The gist of most of the national coverage: The state of Virginia was going to fry an innocent man because procedural rules barred the admission of supposedly exculpatory "new evidence." Time, which put Coleman on its cover, was one of the many news organizations to take up his cause. In his final days, Coleman asserted his innocence in nonstop television and print interviews. Governor Wilder's office was flooded with thousands of clemency pleas; on the day of the execution, his office's phone lines were jammed with calls prompted by a Coleman interview on the Phil Donahue Show.

The callers and letter writers could hardly be blamed for thinking that Governor Wilder had sent an innocent man to "Old Sparky." Outside of the local print media, most reports carefully avoided the key evidence against Coleman while presenting the defense's boldest assertions as virtually uncontroverted fact.

Brad McCoy arrived home from work on schedule at about 11:15 P.M. on the night of the murder. He found his dead, nearly beheaded wife on the floor of a bedroom to which she had been dragged from near the front door, her sweater and bra pulled over her head and her panties around her left ankle. She still was oozing blood.

The crime frightened the 1,300 people of Grundy, deep in southwest Virginia's coal country. But there was no sign of forced entry, which immediately led police to believe Wanda McCoy knew her killer. Coleman, who had a prior conviction for attempted rape, was a prime suspect. Among the key evidence:

--Two pubic hairs found on Mrs. McCoy matched Coleman's in every significant respect.

--Type O blood--the same as Mrs. McCoy's--was found on a pair of jeans Coleman surrendered to police on the day following the murder.

--Witnesses placed Coleman a few minutes' drive from the crime scene within an hour of the murder.

--Roger Matney, who shared a cell-block with Coleman after his arrest, testified that Coleman told him that he had raped Mrs. McCoy. He drew a diagram of the crime scene for police, including the location of a paper towel Mrs. McCoy had used as a makeshift panty-liner. Only the murderer could have known that detail, because it had been kept secret (police use this technique to screen false confessions).

--The rapist-murderer had Type B blood, and he was a "secretor"--one whose blood type can be determined from bodily fluids, such as sperm. Less than 10 per cent of the general population are Type B secretors. Roger Coleman is among them.

It was a strong case. And it got stronger in the course of Coleman's dozen appeals. Over the objections of prosecutors, Miss Behan's predecessors at Arnold & Porter got permission in 1990 to perform a "PCR-DNA" genotyping test (it finds DNA alleles; everyone has a pair) on the sperm found in Mrs. McCoy. Dr. Edward Blake, a forensic scientist described by Coleman's lawyers as "a highly regarded expert" with "particular expertise in the PCR Amplification Test and the interpretation of semen evidence in sexual assault cases," did the testing. It backfired: Mrs. McCoy's attacker had alleles of (1.3,2). Only 2 per cent of the population, Coleman among them, have those genetic characteristics. Thus the blood typing and PCR testing put Coleman among the tiny fraction of the population who have the same genetic traits as the person who murdered Wanda McCoy.

Miss Behan countered this massive evidence with a blunderbuss. She openly accused another man of the murder on the basis of his alleged "confessions" to third parties--even though the man is of the wrong blood type. Miss Behan even attacked Dr. Blake's testing.

Coleman gained public sympathy in large part because one of his appeals--which eventually reached the Supreme Court--was denied because he filed it a day late. In fact, a state court and a federal district court did examine his evidentiary claims on appeal and found them wanting.